Thursday 1 December 2011 06.17 EST
First published on Thursday 1 December 2011 06.17 EST

BREAKDOWN BECOMES THE BATTLEGROUND

Given that the Rugby Football Union finds itself, to put it mildly, at sixes and sevens, it is an appropriate time to be talking about sevens – and a few sixes – with the Millennium Stadium on Saturday the arena for a showdown between two of the leading breakaways in the world game, Sam Warburton and David Pocock.

Seven seems to have become the new 10 in rugby union: it would probably not be right to call them golden boys seeing as how they all seem to end a match with various cuts and bruises on their faces, reflecting the ferocity of the battle at the breakdown, but it is becoming the pivotal position in a team.

The game analysis of this year's World Cup, published this week by the International Rugby Board, shows how the game has changed, not just since the introduction of professionalism, but in the last four years. The breakdown has become the key battleground, not the set pieces.

The IRB's analysis showed that since 1995, ball in play time has increased by 33%; the pass rate has almost doubled; kicking out of hand has declined by 45%; the number of scrums and lineouts has fallen by nearly 40% each; and the number of rucks and mauls has virtually doubled.

The 2011 World Cup, compared with 2007, had the same ball in play time, but there were seven fewer lineouts on average per game, two fewer scrums and 18 more rucks/mauls. Kicking out of hands declined sharply and there were 38 more passes made every match.

Virtually every side in the World Cup, big and small, had a stand-out seven. England were an exception, while South Africa's openside, Heinrich Brüssow, wore six on his jersey, the same number as France's Thierry Dusautoir, who played the openside role at the breakdown with telling effect.

In days gone by, breakaway flankers would look to get to every breakdown first, competing for the ball or trying to slow it down. When rucking was allowed, they would get the stud treatment if they had rolled on to the wrong side of the ruck. Speed was their trademark, along with lines of running.

The modern openside does not waste his time contesting every breakdown: there are too many and teams operate pod systems now. He bides his time, pouncing when he senses a turnover, and this is what marks out the likes of Richie McCaw, Pocock, Warburton and Brüssow.

They are the players who can make a real difference in a game. Set pieces still have their place, even if the scrum is rarely used as a launchpad because of the high number of collapses, but in the World Cup quarter-final Australia were shoved around in the scrum and taken apart in the lineout, playing most of the match in their own territory. That they won was down to Pocock's domination of the breakdown – Brüssow left the field injured after 19 minutes – as well as some poor decision-making by the Springboks.

"The breakdown is such a crucial area now, in defence and attack," said Pocock. "In attack, you are looking to create time and space for when the ball is moved and in defence it is the opposite: you want to slow it down. The intensity is pretty high and you have to put your body on the line at times. Teams are across the board getting better at contesting the breakdown and everyone, from one to 15, has to get involved."

McCaw and Warburton captain their sides, as did Lewis Moody during the World Cup, and so does Dusautoir. Pocock led Australia against the Barbarians last weekend and skippered the Under-20s in the 2008 Junior World Cup. Is seven the ideal player, given the increasing significance of the breakdown, to sport the armband?

"I am not sure about that," said Pocock. "I think you will always get players in different positions filling the captain's role. When you look at someone like Brian O'Driscoll, he has been a successful leader of Ireland for years from the centre. He is also an example of how players other than loose forwards can effectively contest the breakdown.

"Sam Warburton certainly made a name for himself during the World Cup, both as a flanker and as a captain, one of a number of young players who have come through Wales's junior ranks to make Wales's future exciting. I rate them and like the way they try to use the ball."

When Wales played Australia in the World Cup play-off in October, Pocock found himself tussling with a No8 at openside, Toby Faletau, because Warburton was suspended after being sent off for a tip tackle in the semi-final against France. Their coach, Warren Gatland, had opted not to include another openside wing forward in his squad because he felt that, as it was not a position that commanded a place on the bench, he would be bringing someone along for no more than one game, barring injuries or suspension.

It meant Martyn Williams, who looks like remaining stranded on 99 caps, missing out. Williams would have been a specialist replacement for Warburton in the play-off, but he is an openside in a different mould, making his name in an era when breakaways were only not found at a ruck if they had been buried at the bottom of the previous one.

Physical strength is now more of an imperative than speed, which is why Tom Wood would make a strong replacement for Moody as a seven and as a captain: he controlled the breakdown for Northampton against Saracens last weekend and, at 25, is young enough to tap into the youth culture that has proved so influential, off the pitch as well as on it, for other countries this year.

As Pocock and Warburton battle it out on Saturday, two flankers who were involved in the 2008 Junior World Cup, they are more than two of the best exponents of their art in the world: they are symbols of how young players are setting the example to their elders.

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

Only a thin wall at Twickenham separated the start last January and the conclusion on Wednesday evening. The RFU's acting chief executive, Stephen Brown, the third person to fill the position in six crazy months, and the chairman of the professional game board, Ian Metcalfe, sat in the Shakespeare room at HQ reflecting on a year of tragicomedy and drawing the curtain on it.

Knock through the wall and you would have walked into the dining area at the hotel that is part of the Twickenham complex. It was in a function room off it that the former RFU chief executive, John Steele, last January outlined his reorganisation of the departments at Twickenham. Among the changes was the appointment of a performance director who would oversee the senior England side.

It would subsume much of the portfolio of the elite rugby director, Rob Andrew, who was invited to apply for the new post of operations director, a job he started last March. From that day, his contract removed his remit with England; after the botched attempt to appoint a performance director, and England's public relations fiasco in the first two weeks of the World Cup, he was ordered back into the fray.

The role of performance director will now never be filled. A job that precipitated a conflict at Twickenham which, from March, became like an out-of-control bushfire, consuming victim after victim, has, at last even if far too late, been kicked out of the ground.

Steele was asked last January why there was a need for the England head coach/team manager to answer to a performance director when his rivals reported directly to their chief executive. He danced around the question, stepping away from a suspicion that it was a tacit admission that the RFU had made a mistake in appointing Martin Johnson as team manager in 2008 when he had had no experience in the field and twisting out of a suggestion that the post had been created for Sir Clive Woodward.

Steele clearly believed that the process for appointing the performance director would be transparent. When he tried to ensure that happened, he was sacked. Was that what Metcalfe, a member of the union's board of directors, was alluding to when he said that he regretted some of the decisions he had participated in this year?

Sorry was not the hardest word for the RFU on Wednesday. Brown and Metcalfe apologised for England's performance on and off the field in New Zealand, for the way the RFU had handled matters and they apologised to the England players and management in the World Cup for the leak of the reviews into the campaign.

They did not apologise for keeping Andrew on the payroll, even though they were pressed time and again about why they had retained someone who was clearly so unpopular with the public, never mind that the media has tried to encourage that opinion. Good on Brown and Metcalfe, two men whose honesty provided more than a glimmer of hope that the RFU will focus on strategy rather than personality.

There was incredulity in some parts that Andrew would oversee the process for appointing an interim head coach and a permanent one, heading a panel that would make recommendations to the board of directors. Metcalfe's explanation might as well have been whispered because it made no impact.

What he said was that the heads of agreement of the deal between the union and Premiership Rugby demanded that the process for appointing the England head coach had to be overseen by the RFU's elite rugby director. "We do not have such a director," said Metcalfe. "The nearest equivalent is Rob's department."

It explained why the board of directors could not on Wednesday name the interim head coach. There is a process to be observed, but the heads of agreement will need to be changed with the elite rugby director position now going to lie fallow; unless the new chief executive wants to resurrect it.

Andrew, surely, will be relieved to be able to concentrate next year on the areas of his huge department where he has been successful but the snipers will always be after him. The blame game needs a victim. The RFU may be coming to terms with what has happened this year and absorbing where it went wrong, but others are less willing to do so.